Katie Nelson is a freelance photographer and reporter in Nairobi. On a recent trip to a bookstore, she picked up some old National Geographic magazines, including one that is quite famous. The timing, though, was quite ironic.

Julia Nekessa Opoti hosts a radio show in Minneapolis called "Reflections of New Minnesotans." She says some immigrants she hears from on her show say they are reliving traumatic days they thought they had left behind.

Increasingly, the Kenyan government has been taking steps to root out terrorists on its own soil, but the crackdown has been marked by disappearances and extrajudicial killings, which has only inflamed the simmering resentments of young men in the coastal city of Mombasa.

Abdi Nor Iftin always dreamed of leaving Somalia and coming to the United States, and his dream seemed to come true when he won a spot in the Diversity Visa Program, otherwise known as the green card lottery. But it turned out to be only the first step in a difficult and dangerous process.

"Africans are incredible linguists," says Lori Thicke, founder of Translators Without Borders, which enlists Africans to translate everything from medication instructions to election materials into some of Africa's 1,000+ languages.